Installing OS X Developer Tools from DVD

7 February 2004

As my PowerBook was specified with a SuperDrive, Apple shipped all the system software on a convenient single DVD. Traditionally this would take up several CDs, with the Mac OS X Developer Tools (which includes loads of handy things like GCC and CVS) being supplied on a separate CD. After reinstalling my PowerBook to get rid of Classic, I began to hunt around on the DVD to find the developer tools. I couldn’t find them.

Loading up the installation DVD there are basically two options. Install Mac OS X asks you to reboot and then runs the OS install. I’d been down this route and knew the outcome – there wasn’t an option for the developer tools when I had performed by reinstall. The only other option on the DVD is “Install Applications & Classic Support”. I had tentatively edged through this as far as I could go without hitting the Install button, and could see no options to select what I wanted to install. Not wanting to end up with Classic on my system again, I backed out.

After chatting with Ronan, who was adamant that the developer tools where there somewhere, and a bit of Googling on the subject, I took a deep breath and clicked the Install button. As it turns out, all the “Install Applications & Classic Support” tool does is install another tool called Software Restore. It’s Software Restore that then gives you the option to install Classic or iDVD or Developer Tools, or the original applications that came with your Mac.

So now I have the developer tools installed as well as all the original free apps that came with my system (GraphicConverter and OmniGiraffe etc), which I thought I’d lost with the reinstall. I post for the benefit of search engines, and the idle curiosity of those drifting by.

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Caburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ Christopher: Interestingly enough, I discovered the same thing just this past week. I also did a reinstall to get rid of classic ages ago when I bought a copy of Panther. Unfortunately, my original instal for my iMac spans several cds. I would’ve preferred a separate cd for apps and developer tools, the current instal process is a little unnerving.
§ Brandon: I’d like to do the same thing with my brand new iBook, being as I have never used classic, and most likely never will. This is my first Apple computer and kow little about them. How much space would I be gaining back if I reinstalled panther and everything without classic?
§ Drew: Brandon – I can’t offer a figure of how much space you’ll save, but it’s likely to be in the range of a few hundred megabytes. Not earth-shattering with today’s modern discs. My thought was that if I’m never going to use it, why have it there? In a year’s time those few hundred megabytes might be important to me. I just don’t know.

Add to this the added frustration when Classic starts up automatically when an old application is run. I’d rather just get an error message than wait for a second OS to start, and then have to quit it hoping that all the resources it just ate were genuinely released.

The third reason I got rid of Classic is that I like to be tidy. Having a second OS hanging around never being used seems untidy to me, so I took the opportunity to junk it. I think there’s a way to get rid of Classic without reinstalling Panther, but it was for reasons of tidiness that I just blitzed the whole drive.
§ Jesse: I may be on my way to a re-install.. this past week i have started to have some really strange things going with my PB in terms of waking of sleep and freezing apps. The freezing apps only happened twice but still… no good tools to repair Panther so a re-install it is (unless techtool has panther support now). Ugg.. still a happy mac user, just one who demands perfection!

heheh I downloaded the developer tools from developer.apple – i had no idea they were on the cd. ;)
§ Brandon: Looks like total mb count is, as you said, is minimal and nearly negligible.

I’ve heard numerous times, before I bought my first mac, and still now – that one of the amazing beauties of a new mac computer is that it has 3 operating systems, with a fourth one only $200USD away…

Great! But I don’t use classic. Don’t know anything about it. MacOSXHints had a little thing on just disabling the preferences pane, but that wouldn’t really procure that lost space. It would just be out there in limbo, never getting used.

I’m planning on trying the method outlined in the link to remove classic.
§ Adrian: I am trying to do exactly what was described in the top paragraph, but am not actually sure if I already HAVE Developer Tools. Following a successful install from CD/DVD, is there a “Developer Tools” Folder that appears somewhere: perhaps in Applications or Library?
§ Roger: After installation, put the dvd back in and open it. The XCode tools package is at the top level.
§ Ian:
After going through the software restore install process, I still had to do a search for developer to find the developer tools install program- so to get it right you have to go through THREE install steps- very elegant ;p

Thanks for posting this seems like apple could mention this in their supprt pages, but I guess then we would have less reason to just but tiger. . .
§ Meredith:
Thanks for this. Turns out, it’s similar for iMac (Intel) users: simply pop in the iMac DVD that came with your computer and there’s actually a folder in there labeled ‘XCode Tools’! Phew. I was afraid of putting it in so I did some research first, this post put my mind at ease.

All in the <head>